Creating a buyer persona is one of the best ways to ensure that you’re connecting with potential customers and truly understand your target market.

But it can be difficult to know just who should be included in those personas.

When creating a buyer persona, the first step is to realise that these personas are not created based on an actual person. Instead, they’re a representation of your overall customer.

These are composite pictures of the real people who could buy products or services like yours. But these personas aren’t just made up, and are carefully created based on actual information about your customers. If your personas are simply based on internal or generic ideas about your target customers, the content you’re developing won’t be any better than it would before you developed personas.

The information you need to include in your buyer personas includes:

Priorities
What are your target customers’ biggest priorities? What are they dedicating their money and time to?

Success
What does your persona associate with success? What are the rewards or metrics that mean success to them?

Barrier
What’s stopping your target customer from purchasing from you? What are the biggest barriers or reasons for hesitating?

Role
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, it’s important to know which role your prospect has in the buying process. For B2B companies, the goal is to sell to the people in the company that has the authority to make decisions.

This is a lot of information to gather, and you can find it by gathering information from:

Customer Data
Interview your current customers, or look at data that you've already collected from those customers. You’ll usually find that your sales and customer service teams will have more than enough data for you to use. You can also use Google Analytics for interest reports and demographics to give you helpful insights.

Competitor Information
If you’re targeting your competitor’s customers, there are a number of tools and gadgets you can use to learn more about them. Use Socialbakers Analytics or Followerwonk to get information about their social media followers.
Google Alerts are also a good way to see where your competitors are getting their backlinks, monitor any mentions of their company, and even monitor industry-specific keywords.

Market Research
Investing in market research is another great way to get information for the development of your buyer personas. They’ll do everything from sending out questionnaires to conducting focus groups for the people in your target audience.
Keep in mind that successful buyer personas are about finding more than just the general information about your target market. Look closely at any data that comes back from market research and read the actual words that potential customers say or write in response to questions.

Interaction
Some of the most valuable insights come from interacting directly with your customers. That means speaking with your customers or potential customers to find out more about who they are as people. Encourage every person in your company to listen to what your customers are saying and take this information seriously so your buyer personas can continue to evolve in the future.

Want to learn more about how buyer personas can help you grow your business? Get in touch today.